Sensory experiences in a virtual reality architecture exhibition The Forest in the House (original) (raw)
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Studying visitors' exhibition experiences in an immersive virtual environment
Visitor Studies Association Annual Conference, 2019
An interdisciplinary framework From a visitor studies perspective, one challenge in studying visitors' 3D virtual reality experiences in museum exhibitions has been the need for an evaluation framework that productively integrates findings from specialized technology-related studies of VR with "outcomes" research, defined as "changes in visitor behavior, skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, or condition after participating in a learning activity or experience" (VSA glossary of terms). We present how this challenge was addressed in a study of visitors' experiences in a virtual-physical environment designed for an architecture museum 'exhibition experiment'.
Finding the message : exploring the new conventions of VR experience
Since 2014, a new wave of Virtual Reality (VR) development has been on the rise, calling for more artists to utilize this new technology in creating art works. However, there is still room for improvement in both the technology itself and its application in art creations. Firstly, the lack of clear definitions in VR results in many problems. Usually, the term 'VR creators' is used to address all of VR game producers, 360 filmmakers, and VR experience designers. This prevents the 'creators' from clearly defining the realm of their roles, thus the communication between them becomes less efficient. This inefficiency in turn prohibits the establishment of design patterns, forcing artists to acquire technical skills. This, in most cases, intensifies the difficulty of transdisciplinary collaborations, which are usually seen in big-budget projects promoted by big companies or famous studios. Due to the hybrid nature of this new medium, the outcome of the artwork is hard to predict. Participants' experiences can vary widely based on their decoding performance. What is more, there is a big chance that the work will not receive credit as artworks but will be criticized as frivolous toys. This paper builds on my experience of creating a thesis project, Captive Memoirs, in which I explore the multiple dimensions of designing an VR experience. Starting from the theoretical study and analysis of various artworks, I attempt to define, for further reference, the design elements that a VR experience is composed of. Through the presentation of this thesis, an operational system is established that investigates the design conventions of VR experience. This work also examines the relationship between the audience and the interactive art installation to investigate why the audiences' interaction is the key to VR experience. Above all, rethinking the creative practice of VR based artworks reveals the inspiration for new art forms and creates the opportunity to question the new standards of art.
Special Issue "Perceiving CH through Digital Technologies", 2018
Virtual Museums (VMs) and their audiences have always been studied as separated worlds. Recently the importance of cross-methodological studies has been accepted by the academic sector for their usefulness in the process of assessing the impact of such VMs. Hedonic aspects, such as emotions, senses, perception, and environmental atmosphere rather than technicalities, like usability and affordance, have indeed played a precise and crucial role in the meaning-making of the world around us. This contribution will highlight the need for a collaborative sharing of ideas among designers and developers, creators and technicians, in order to reach sensory immersion and emotional involvement in VMs that will translate into enhanced participation and the predisposition to assimilate and memorize cultural contents. It has been stated that "a virtual museum is a digital entity." As such, it is inevitably based on technology, on its user interface (UI), on the visualization solutions it employs, and on its usability and ability to interact with the end user in order to transfer a certain message. VMs are designed to complement, enhance, or augment the ordinary museum experience through contextualization, narration, personalization, interactivity and richness of content. This contribution originates not only from the lessons learned in twenty years of research by CNR ITABC, but it also moves one step further in the direction of exchanged experiences and good practices between the humanistic and the technological sectors, therefore contributing to the promotion of lifelong learning in Virtual Museums.
This paper describes an experiment entitled Experiment 2-``Feel your Design`', which belongs to a group of experiments undertaken in the context of a PhD in architecture. The goal of the experiment described in this paper was to evaluate the emotional reaction of a viewer to changes in the sensory perception when being stimulated by viewing, listening and smelling immersive architectural models. The Experiment was taken as part of a workshop with students of architecture. The workshop incorporated concepts of``Sensory Design`' and``Emotional Design`'. The task assigned to the students proposed that immersive, atmospheric models were built according to a specific narrative and included specific scents and sounds which were supposed to re-enforce such a narrative or induce a certain mood. The results of the Experiment were evaluated through the use of a ``PresenceQuestionnairè' and a ``SAM chart`'. The Experiment had the participation of 7 students who produced one model each and served in the Experiment as subjects. Experiment 2 took place on the last day of thè`Feel your Design`' workshop. The host institution was Fachbereich Architektur, Digitale Werkzeuge, TU Kaiserslautern. The experiment had the technical support of the Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI).
Virtual technologies have proved be a valuable support for the knowledge and fruition of the Cultural Heritage. The way they are employed shapes the affection and emotional involvement of the public to which the experience is addressed. On one side, Cultural Heritage represents the historical legacy of a group of people; on the other side, it is also something constantly changing, a process of social appropriation of cultural identity. Features like interactivity, storytelling and sensory immersion are typical of virtual environments; they lend themselves well to the field of Cultural Heritage because (a) they create the right conditions for a fruitful learning experience which "alert" many receptive channels; the latter stimulate strong emotions that allow creating mental connections between what we see, what we feel and what we have in our memory. They also (b) provide physical or simulated mobility that stands at the basis of any informal learning experience (so said " learn-by-doing "); in this sense, natural interaction applications and tangible interfaces are designed to let the user feel more embodied in the virtual space. They (c) make curiosity and interest arise in a spontaneous form, gradually shaping the memory and the understanding of what we are experiencing. From these premises, the Virtual Museum of the Tiber Valley project has been used as case study to conduct an user experience evaluation. The Italian National Research Council, with the support of national and international contributors, has progressively developed a methodological approach for evaluating user experience into museum contexts trying to come up with a matrix of elements to be further applied to other evaluative scenarios. The focus of such studies shifted recently from the pure usability of immersive virtual systems to the attention on the pedagogical aspects and cognitive affordances. The latter allowed to test some theoretical procedures about direct and informal learning. This is what this contribute is about. What is relevant here is the centrality of the end-user who needs to be the main protagonist of any cultural public transmission and thus of any investigation programme [7].
Travels through the imagination: Future visions of VR and related technologies
YVR2001, December, 2001
The research question driving my own research is the following: Which varying modes of interactivity add to the experienced significance of and engagement in, a virtual tourist environment? Do inbuilt evaluation mechanisms compare favorably to more traditional feedback mechanisms when gauging engagement in an interactive virtual environment? This research question is a direct result of an extended analysis as to which factors are hindering virtual environments. In this paper I argue that VR (or, as I refer to it here, Virtual Environments), before it can go forwards, needs to address several issues that have prevented widespread dissemination of its potential. The issues that needs to be addressed are: ¨ Accessibility, which includes terminology and classification, and collaboration between related disciplines especially between designers and those that evaluate the psychological effects of virtual presence on the participants. ¨ Interactivity, between the virtual actor, environment, object and task; social interaction; and messaging between actors. ¨ Dynamic histories, with annotation; as well as augmentation between fact fiction and imagination. After discussing what I think needs to be done, the paper ends by describing a virtual environment prototype using inbuilt evaluation mechanisms to gauge the effect of various forms of interactivity on user engagement. The findings will hopefully be of particular interest to virtual heritage, cultural tourism, and archaeological or even anthropological digital simulations.
The Virtual (Reality) Museum of Immersive Experiences
2018
This paper outlines an investigation and describes strategies to capture, simulate and reproduce experiences originally designed for large-scale immersive architectures within Virtual Reality. Applications and experiences created for a specific immersive platform depend on the complex and costly technical infrastructure they were originally designed for. Descriptions and video documentation only go so far in illustrating an immersive experience. The embodied aspect, the emotional engagement and the dimensional extend, central to immersion, is mostly lost in translation. This project offers a prototypical implementation of a large-scale virtual exhibition, incorporating various immersive architectures and applications situated within a fictional 3D scene. The motivation behind this project is to provide a framework to showcase and for the conservation of immersive experiences and systems outside specialised facilities and labs. Furthermore, it presents a test-bed and space for experimentation to design and evaluate immersive experiences and architecture before they are developed at full scale. Immersive environments. Immersive architectures. Virtual Reality. Virtual museum. UI.
2021
In the development of architectural representation, the image has become a metonym of architectural experience. This productive tension is maintained by the expectation of fragmented representation to identify and reproduce the experiential and phenomenological dimensions perceived in the physical experience with architecture. Returning to the investigation of representation and perception exemplifies that each new technology introduces a new scale of extension in both design capability and opportunity for feedback. The degree of immersivity introduced by virtual reality technologies elicits several scales of experience. This thesis uses virtual prototyping in the design stage to elicit a product that is not a reflection of intention, but a result of something discovered, evaluated and experienced in immersion prior to realization. An increase in receptivity to the qualities of the design and its context relative to the perceiver has the potential to change the relationship of digit...
IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE APPRECIATION OF ARCHITECTURAL AESTHETICS
DİCLE UNIVERSITY II. INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE SYMPOSIUM 11-12 OCTOBER 2021 D. Ü – Diyarbakır, Türkiye, 2021
The built environment usually immerses people within its three-dimensional space and therefore provides them with special immersive aesthetic experiences that differ from experiencing normal art works. However, the two-dimensional analogue architectural presentations cannot provide such immersive experiences of the architectural space because they are nonimmersive. Neither can these experiences be achieved by Virtual Reality (VR) presenting the architectural space on computer screens because it is also non-immersive. Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) has emerged as a means of providing an immersive experience of the three-dimensional environment using special Headset Mounted Display (HMD). It has been especially used in architectural design to explore newly designed projects. The use of IVR to explore existing buildings is less common. Rarely common is the use of IVR in experiencing aesthetic qualities of architectural projects both built and not built. This research presents an experiment using IVR to study architectural aesthetics of a real building in contrast to its photographs. It was discovered that IVR significantly improved the appreciation of architectural aesthetics of the building, enhancing the approach of using IVR as an effective architectural design and appreciation tool.